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paulhart

1,280 karma · joined April 20, 2007

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paulhart··on Someone has decompiled the Adobe suite, rebuilt in Rust and released it as OSS
The Adobe suite is just the start - they've made "open-source, clean-room reimplementation" versions of many other apps: https://github.com/storytold
paulhart··on I'm Making Strandfall, a Solarpunk Orienteering Larp
No wonder people don't believe it exists - it's crazy expensive (super cool, and crazy expensive).
paulhart··on A Fundamental Principle of Aeronautical Engineering Has Been Overturned
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-fluid-mec...
paulhart··on I Ported Coreboot to the ThinkPad X270
I have one for work; I was excited to receive it, I’ve never been more disappointed with a laptop bearing the ThinkPad brand. Lots of intermittent issues with graphics, BT audio, and performance.
paulhart··on The true story behind the Toronto mystery tunnel (2015)
The follow-up article is lovely too: https://macleans.ca/news/canada/passing-the-headlamp-the-tor...

And this one later in 2015 that speaks to his use of the fundraiser money: https://www.thestar.com/news/insight/york-u-s-mystery-tunnel...

paulhart··on Eat Real Food
So the data is skewed by burgers georg who eats 3,000 Big Macs each day?
paulhart··on Clicks Communicator
I'm more interested in the Comet - https://mecha.so/comet - as a thing to support in pre-order. They will be launching their Kickstarter soon, and the founder is very active and transparent on their Discord.
paulhart··on The overengineered solution to my pigeon problem (2022)
Is there a repository for that? I’d like to dissuade certain species from my porch but not others…
paulhart··on Introduction to GrapheneOS
That's a Chromebook, no?
paulhart··on Reverse engineering Solos smart glasses
lol I just ordered a pair - many available on eBay at this listing (same as I bought from): https://ebay.us/m/t2i9YF
paulhart··on About Containers and VMs
According to their Github page, they _are_ linuxcontainers (in a way), and Incus is Apache licensed:

Incus, which is named after the Cumulonimbus incus or anvil cloud started as a community fork of Canonical's LXD following Canonical's takeover of the LXD project from the Linux Containers community.

The project was then adopted by the Linux Containers community, taking back the spot left empty by LXD's departure.

Incus is a true open source community project, free of any CLA and remains released under the Apache 2.0 license. It's maintained by the same team of developers that first created LXD.

LXD users wishing to migrate to Incus can easily do so through a migration tool called lxd-to-incus.

https://github.com/lxc/incus

paulhart··on Starship's Tenth Flight Test
Their scenario is that the ships are mostly going to be "fuel mules" to ferry propellant to the ship that is destined to go somewhere (i.e. Mars) - so if you want an armada to travel to another planet, you need a much larger fleet of supply vehicles to prepare your armada. Hence the need to mass produce them.
paulhart··on Launch HN: Hyprnote (YC S25) – An open-source AI meeting notetaker
Yeah, IBM employee here, not speaking on behalf of the company, own opinions etc. The odds this is approved for employee use are essentially zero.
paulhart··on Home Battery versus Generator
I didn't see anything about load shifting in the article - are there any sites that help calculate the ROI on a battery system that is used to power the house during the day and recharges overnight?

For example, here in Ontario Canada, we have the option of an "Ultra Low Overnight" rate where the energy price is 2.8c/kWh between 11pm and 7am, while the tiered rates start at 9.3c/kWh; given the 6.5c/kWh delta, how many days' worth of use would be needed in order to pay off a given battery system? How would adding a solar system affect that calculation?

Rate references: https://www.oeb.ca/consumer-information-and-protection/elect...

paulhart··on OpenAI says it has evidence DeepSeek used its model to train competitor
"You are trying to kidnap what I have rightfully stolen"
paulhart··on Amsterdam Compiler Kit for Cray X-MP
30+ years ago I did a week’s “work experience” at the UK offices of Cray Research in Bracknell (and, shockingly, nobody had ever approached them before to do this).

I spent a couple of days with the software support team and was given an account on a UNICOS-running X-MP (hostname was either “forest” or “wind” - I specifically remember the second because the motd said “if you have problems with wind, please contact [redacted]” and that made my 16yo brain chuckle). Anyway, my benchmarking program was to calculate all the factorials up to 100!, and then repeat the process a lot. Fibbonacci, as given in the README, seems like more fun ;)

paulhart··on Which power plant does my electricity come from?
You make an excellent point - so much so that it already exists today at the wholesale level in many markets. What you're describing is Locational Marginal Pricing (LMP) - a reasonable introduction is here: https://www.enverus.com/blog/an-intro-to-locational-marginal...

In the wholesale market the biggest consideration is transmission capacity - if I can generate 100MW of electricity at $15/MW but the transmission line between me and the demand can only carry 20MW, and another generator can generate 100MW for $30/MW with excess transmission capacity to the demand, the price at the demand will lean heavily towards the $30/MW price.

The same model could be applied to local grids as a way to "manage" residential solar installations for example; overcapacity is penalized through pricing signals (but if you throw in batteries so you can shift the release of electricity...).

paulhart··on New Nano-Tech to Control the Brain Using Magnetic Fields
I was a research subject for a TMS study a few years ago (I made myself eligible by way of a bicycle accident). Having your thumb twitch because the researcher “shot” magnetic fields at my brain was an amusing experience; she said some people completely freak out at it.
paulhart··on Unit is a general purpose visual programming system
https://github.com/samuelmtimbo/unit/
paulhart··on Map of Pontypandy in Fireman Sam
That story is an original from Rev. W. Audry (my grandmother bought a lot of those books for me as a child, I specifically remember that story and Gordon being imprisoned until he accepted his lot in "life").

It wasn't just okay in the 80s / early 90s, it comes from waaaay before then.

paulhart··on A startup's "tablet" gears up to take on Apple's iPad
So it’s an e-ink tablet running Android with front lighting but without access to the Play store? I’m not clear what’s so revolutionary about that.
paulhart··on Show HN: Peanut Butter Spinner
I just use my electric drill with a paint mixer attachment, like https://www.homedepot.ca/product/a-richard-paint-mixer-16in-... and I've only had one spray incident, when I forgot to hold on to the jar while running the drill. It was epic!
paulhart··on Autonomous Overhead Powerline Recharging for Uninterrupted Drone Operations [video]
More likely it’ll be utility companies that want to do remote and autonomous inspection of the transmission network. It’s already a big business, but if you can run the drone the entire length of the line without relocating the base as frequently, or have no base at all and transmit data over 5G? Big wins.
paulhart··on Pains of building your own billing system
If you're building a product, is the billing component a part of your USP?

Really?

Odds are that it's not, and therefore you should farm out that work to someone who _does_ make it their job. There are reasons why companies implement software from Microsoft, Oracle, and SAP, including that it's better to reduce costs on things that don't differentiate you in your market (and it's nice to have someone to "pointedly talk at" when things go wrong).

paulhart··on Pains of building your own billing system
AKA a suspense account (in this case tied to the sender). “I have money from this entity but I don’t yet know why”.
paulhart··on OpenFPGA
I’ve pasted the specs below, but in my opinion the biggest difference is that the OpenFPGA - in its Analogue Pocket form - is an end-user friendly target. MiSTer is more “enthusiast-friendly” with more options and upgrades (including an recommended add-on to the basic kit).

MiSTer “tech specs”:

Intel/Altera Cyclone V SE (5CSEBA6U23I7) FPGA SoC with 110,000LE (41,500ALM) and 5,570Kbit of Block RAM.

ARM Cortex A9 dual-core CPU at 800MHz.

HDMI video and audio allowing easy connectivity to any modern monitor/TV.

1GB of DDR3 RAM that is directly available to both ARM and FPGA.

High-speed ARM <-> FPGA interconnect due to both being in the same chip.

OpenFPGA specs:

Intel/Altera Cyclone V FPGA 49K logic elements and 3.4Mbit BRAM

Intel/Altera Cyclone 10 15K logic elements

2x independently addressable 16MB cellular RAM (128Mbit x 16)

32MB low latency memory 1x synchronous DRAM 64MB (32Mbit x 16)

1x asynchronous SRAM 256KB (128Kbit x 16)

paulhart··on The Swimmer (1964)
Here's to sugar on the strawberries!
paulhart··on NASA selects a plan to "swarm" Proxima Centauri with tiny probes
Good typo in the article:

“the energy source for a lightsail is photos (which have no mass and move at the speed of light).”

So, it can be powered by memes?

paulhart··on New Entry-Level Lucid Air Pure RWD Starts at $78,675, Still with 410-Mile Range
"affordable" is doing a LOT of work in that first sentence of the article.
paulhart··on Bentham's Mugging (2022)
I love this for three reasons:

1: the dig at Effective Altruism;

2: I went to UCL back in the days when you could hang out with the Bentham In A Box;

3: One of my (distant) colleagues is a descendant of Bentham.

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